The New Adventures Of Old Paul Ryan

The courtier press is almost finished with its reboot of Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny starver from Wisconsin and recent first runner-up in our national vice-presidential pageant. They always have had a sweet-tooth for the oh-so-sincere numbers "genius," even while he was crashing and burning and failing to carry his home precinct on behalf of the 2012 ticket. Put simply, there is not now a bigger fake in national politics than Paul Ryan, who went to high school and college on my dime -- You're welcome, dickhead. -- who's never had a real adult job outside of government and/or wingnut welfare, and who nonetheless believes that government money blunts the work ethic of everybody except him.

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The reboot centers on Ryan's casting himself as "The Conservative Who Cares About The Poor." This, he says, stems from his deeply held Catholic faith -- except that, when he tried to run that riff past the Jesuits at Georgetown during the campaign, they handed him his head, and even the National Council of Catholic Bishops wasn't buyingthis codswollop. Now, though, he's back again, and with a 200-page report about government anti-poverty programs that comes to the unsurprising conclusion that Paul Ryan is right about anything. Nonetheless, because the report has been produced by Paul Ryan, there has been a positive scramble to announce that a new actual "debate" about poverty has been opened, and that the Republicans now have a "chance" to come up with their own solution to the problem afflicting millions of people who wouldn't vote for them even if they could, and who the Republicans have no intention of allowing to vote anyway.

Considered a Republican policy visionary (Ed. Note: Oy!), the 2012 GOP vice presidential nominee released the report amid a listening and learning tour of low-income neighborhoods that began 18 months ago after President Barack Obama was reelected. Ryan toured struggling neighborhoods with Bob Woodson, the head of the Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, an organization that works with disenfranchised people.

So is The Washington Post.

Ryan, who was Mitt Romney's running mate on the GOP presidential ticket in 2012, said Republicans are ready to engage with Democrats on one of the president's signature issues, hoping to move beyond the rhetoric of past campaigns and provide voters with a sense of which programs they would like to revamp. Ryan and his aides are unsparing in how they take the hammer to current federal policies. On page after page, the report casts a critical eye on how the government administers money to the poor and related bureaucracies, using a bevy of academic literature and federal studies as evidence.

One of the study's authors, Jane Waldfogel, a professor at Columbia University and a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation, said she was surprised when she read the paper, because it seemed to arbitrarily chop off data from two of the most successful years of the war on poverty. Waldfogel and her colleagues looked at an alternative measure of the poverty rate known as the Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), which factors in government benefits like food stamps and programs like the earned-income tax credit. That alternative measure is thought to present a more accurate and realistic gauge of the poverty and the real-world effects of government programs aimed at combatting it. The Columbia researchers found that, using their model of the SPM, the poverty rate fell from 26 percent in 1967 to 15 percent in 2012. Ryan only cites data from 1969 onward, ignoring a full 36 percent of the decline. "It's technically correct, but it's an odd way to cite the research," said Waldfogel. "In my experience, usually you use all of the available data. There's no justification given. It's unfortunate because it really understates the progress we've made in reducing poverty."

Look. Let's not all be children. Paul Ryan's entire political career has been about eliminating the federal government's ability to do anything except raise an army and keep the tax burden on the country's wealthiest citizens low. This is the Makers And Takers guy, remember? There is no compelling reason now to believe he's changed at all. He has yet to take his lunatic "budget" off the table. He is a true believer in voodoo economics. He still believes in voucherizing Medicare into oblivion. (He would like to do the same thing to Social Security, too, but that gets kept on the downlow.) He is not opposed to federal programs to help the poor because of their (relatively) small effect on the budget, or even out of concern for The Deficit. He is opposed to them because he does not believe that they are legitimate functions of government. Anybody who buys that he's sincerely morphed himself into a champion of what Karl Rove once called "compassionate conservatism" should not be allowed to cut their own meat without supervision.

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Other people already have dissected the report -- which is...200 PAGES! -- and done so with some hilarity. But I'd like to highlight one little element of the report that functions not only as a perfect microcosm of the whole, as well as a clear indication that Paul Ryan remains the very big fake he always has been. There is a section in the document regarding the Supplemental Security Income program, with which I became somewhat familiar while writing the story of the end of the life of a little boy named Marcus Stephens. Consequently, a very loud bell went off when I came to this particular paragraph.

Soon after, there were numerous instances of children inappropriately receiving benefits. SSI was sometimes called "crazy checks" based on the suggestion that if children "acted crazy" at school they could readily qualify for SSI payments.

Jesus H. Christ on a hedge fund's dinner tab, "crazy checks" again? "Crazy checks" was a trope invented by one reporter in Arkansas and based on what was essentially a homework assignment from a professor at Arkansas State. (Oh, and in the words of the report itself, these were "sometimes called" "crazy checks" primarily by wingnut congresscritters and ambitious reporters who didn't know any better.) That it took flight was a case of profound journalistic malpractice on the part of a great number of the institutions now working to prop up Paul Ryan as a serious person. Three different studies -- including one from the GAO in 1994 -- concluded that the evidence for the "crazy checks" phenomenon largely was either anecdotal, or based on claims that were turned down anyway. That Bill Clinton tightened the screws on the people in the program through the 1996 welfare "reform" act was a gratuitous piece of cruel centrism. Clinton signed on to the new standards over the objection of several members of Congress, but it had everything to do with electoral votes in North Carolina, and very little to do with actually fighting poverty.

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The citing of the "crazy checks" phenomenon gives the entire game away.Ryan is back to makers-and-takers again. And, not for nothing, but, in all of these 200 PAGES (!), you will find practically nothing coming from any of those poor folks for whom Paul Ryan has felt so tender during the many hours of his "listening tour" of America's impoverished areas, and for whom he wants to do so very much. I'm sure this is nothing but an oversight. It's always easier to talk about poverty if you don't have to mention poor people.